* Roy Schestowitz peremptorily fired off this memo:
> links for 2008-02-22
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| What If Microsoft Gave An Interoperability Party and Nobody Came?
>|
>| Jason Brooks - Open Source - Microsoft?s Interop Forecast Is Partly
>| Cloudy
>|
>| ?However, the legal environment surrounding interoperability between
>| Microsoft?s products and the open-source applications that have sprung
>| up to rival Redmond?s proprietary wares is scarcely less murky today
>| than it was yesterday.?
>
> http://www.sutor.com/newsite/blog-open/?p=2071
>
> Yes, Microsoft 'loves' open source. loves to f* it. Maybe.
http://blogs.eweek.com/brooks/content/open_source/microsofts_interop_forecast_is_partly_cloudy.html
Unlike those Office binary format specifications, which are covered
under Microsoft's we-pledge-not-to-sue-you Open Specification
Promise, the Windows Server and Communication protocols are covered
under a different, somewhat twisty promise that reminds me of the
scene from Pulp Fiction where Vincent lays out for Jules the rules
surrounding Amsterdam hash bars:
Me: Okay, so tell me again about the Windows protocols.
Microsoft: Okay, watcha wanna know?
Me: Open-source apps can interoperate with Windows now, right?
Microsoft: Yeah, it's legal, but it ain't 100 percent legal. I mean,
you can't just develop an open-source app that interoperates with
Windows and start using it or selling it. I mean, we want you to use
these protocols, but only in certain designated ways.
Me: Example?
Microsoft: Yeah, it breaks down like this, okay, it's legal to
develop open-source software with the Windows protocols, it's legal
to distribute those apps, but only for noncommercial purposes.
If you pay for our as-yet-undisclosed patent license, it's legal to
sell or use those apps, but but, that doesn't matter, because ...
get a load of this, we have no intent to sue people who infringe on
these patents.
But we might change our minds.
--
I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper
384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they
talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in
any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing
generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of
memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was
ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address
base for applications within... oh five or six years people were
complaining.
-- Bill Gates, Smithsonian Institution interview (1993)
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